Last year, local hospitals treated more than 53,000 patients for cancer. From prostate and breast cancers to melanoma and pediatric lymphoma, these numbers show no signs of abating. In 2003, the American Cancer Society estimates, cancer will strike 32,800 more Virginians. The State-wide death toll this year is estimated at 13,700. It’s hard to obtain […]

That’s an excerpt I like from “Whitman in 1863,” a song on local folk musician Brady Earnhart’s new album, Manalapan. In a way, it’s only fitting that the enterprise contains a tribute to America’s bard. Earnhart wrote his dissertation on the man many consider the country’s first original poet, and his songs, while the product […]

They say that in Charlottesville, the guy who serves your coffee probably has a PhD. Increasingly, the coffeeshop where he works likely serves another function too: art gallery. In the past several years, all over town, new art spaces have proliferated—in restaurants and boutiques, and as cooperatives and nonprofits. The town’s concentration of visual art […]

In early March, the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force arrested 18 people, ages 17 to 30, following almost a year of undercover operations in Belmont. Eight men and one woman face charges of distributing marijuana. One man faces charges of distributing both marijuana and imitation cocaine. Eight suspects face cocaine charges. In JADE press […]

Our sex life first took a hit seven months ago when we brought home an 8-week-old attention-hogger named Gauss. By the time we mustered up the courage to throw his doggy ass out of the bedroom, my husband landed his dream project at work. Ever since, Shaili has taken to stumbling through the door at […]

After water, coffee is the world’s most popular beverage. For most, it’s also a way of life. “Long before the great coffee craze, I was born and raised in an era when it was totally natural for my family to serve us kids espresso after dinner,” says Tony LaBua, owner of the Java Hut and […]

They called it an incubator: the upstairs of the Charlottesville Tomorrow building on West Main Street, space leased to University faculty whose ideas no longer quite fit the contours of academia. To move into one of the six offices subsidized by UVA’s Patent Foundation signaled progress for a new biotech company. It meant that early-phase […]

There’s a truck with a trailer driving in the deep end!” says Pat Healy, looking out from a window in the clubhouse at Fry’s Spring Beach Club at the crater where a 100-meter swimming pool used to be. On this bright February day, it looks more like a giant, muddy hole, shored up with remnants […]

Since the first cave dwellers plunked a rock against a wall for purely expressive reasons, music has been social—even sometimes political. Like any art form, music offers an individual’s take on the surrounding world, one that is in turn absorbed and cast back into the world by an audience. Every song, no matter the subject, […]

Books and writers certainly get their due starting at about this time of the year as the Virginia Festival of the Book ramps up. Local authors who have been holed away surface to share their year’s work in one way or another, shedding temporary (and sometimes unwanted) light on a solitary process. But there is […]

Using the latest DNA technology, Charlottesville police in November linked a series of area rapes to a single perpetrator. The attacker’s modus operandi—violent sneak attacks on carefully selected victims—led police to suspect the serial rapist could be responsible for as many as seven assaults since 1997. Hoping for a tip that could lead to an […]

Seeds…those sleepy little kernels tucked in their winter coats. Not one metabolic quiver until, suddenly and by the millions, they start to move. They travel by ground and by air, from state to state, from December through April. That’s the time of year when discerning growers scour seed catalogues, browsing long lists of plants with […]

It starts with the music , one of those brass-and-percussion fanfares that news anchors like to hum on their way to work. Then the announcer trumpets: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’” And before you’ve had a chance to sort through the incongruity of […]

Flashlights, GOP handbooks and dirty shirts: very, very costly. This will not be an O. Henry moment.In what follows you will find no stories of bartered hair and pocket watches. If there is sentimentality in these tales of best and worst gifts, we didn’t put it there. Deploying the sharpest investigative tools, by which […]

What purpose does a gate serve but to limit access? Depending on the setting, a gate can forbid freedom or promise a new horizon. Or, if you live in Keswick, Glenmore, Lake Monticello or any of the ersatz gated subdivisions around Charlottesville, a gate can rise as a shining symbol of such lifestyle amenities as […]

Rain…The word alone forms a complete prayer. Spoken as a plea or demand, the simple invocation has been a common mantra across the Southeast this year. The congregation of thirsty supplicants included, until recently, those of us living in the Rivanna Watershed, which in the past four years has been shy about 40 inches of […]

Two years ago, Charlottesville carpenter Louise Finger packed her tool belt and sized up a new project. She put aside her usual routine of building swanky homes for Central Virginia’s well-to-do and embarked on what she says is a more rewarding path: constructing no-frills public structures for communities in need. Ilove that kind of work, […]

The first day of shooting ANJLZ begins on a cold mid-November morning, in a large garage located on an estate in Free Union, just west of Charlottesville. A group of people, most still looking sleepy and clutching cups of coffee, are milling about in two small rooms adjacent to the garages main bay. A few […]

"Welcome to our cheese manufacturing facility," Christine Solem says pointedly. She’s standing in her cozy, well-worn kitchen north of Charlottesville, where she and John Coles have run a small goat and vegetable farm since 1973. Outside, their 24 goats wander around a large, partly wooded enclosure. Solem and Coles, in fact, make goat cheese in […]

In case it escaped your notice, there’s an election scheduled for November 5. We don’t blame you if you’ve been out of touch on this subject. Even dedicated pols might find themselves bored by a campaign season that features empty platforms, absent candidates and geeky legislative reforms. For instance, who is there to care about […]

Daily we have waitedby the fax machine for a dousing of the region’s bad news, expressed in terms of percents and millions of gallons: 54.2, 7.091; 53.2, 6.905. These are, of course, the terms of the drought (reservoir level and regional usage), which, even after a healing, gentle rain, have not fundamentally changed since August. […]

George Garrett is a storyteller and has been since his age was measured in single digits. It was then that Garrett says he decided he wanted to be a writer, even though he had no clue, at the time, what it meant to be one. Today, after more than 60 years practicing his craft, Garrett […]

When he returned home to Charlottesville after earning a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Joshua Galloway wanted to keep up with his drawing, so he enrolled in an advanced drawing course in the evenings at Piedmont Virginia Community College for three years in a row. With the help […]